Last year Lenovo launched a $10 million marketing push to grab a slice of the tablet market that's dominated by Apple and Samsung. Launching a consumer product off a sales base of zero is a tough ask. But within six months, it now claims a 10% share.
The technology brand, despite being the number one provider in the world of personal computers, and number three globally for tablets and smartphones, had a consumer sales base of zero in Australia and New Zealand as it had focussed on b2b sales.
Lenovo launched its premium Yoga products, PCs and tablets, believing them to be on par or better than tech offered by its rivals Apple and Samsung, but knew that it couldn't match them in media and marketing spend.
Lenovo’s Asia-pacific marketing head, Nick Reynolds, told AdNews that the brand weighted its media spend towards social and also giving consumers a first-class retail experience in order to get results.
“We decided we'd focus first on the premium products first, which is the Yoga family and then secondly we're going to focus on looking like a number one brand in retail,” Reynolds said.
Looking like a top brand in retail for Lenovo meant fitting out 400 stores from both Harvey Norman and JBHi-Fi in order to attract consumers in store as well as gaining that legitimacy in market.
Reynolds explained that the brand made a call to focus on social channels when it came to marketing its products: “We looked at the market and thought we can't beat the majors in pure spend, and we aren't going to peanut butter spread our marketing spend, so we thought we'd be very focused on digital and social,” he said.
“Over 60% of our spend has gone into digital and social with a view of making sure we have at least 10%-20% share of voice. In digital it's been about 20% share of voice in social, we're now number three in the market, behind Samsung and Apple.”
Lenovo spent $10 million on its consumer launch and Reynolds told AdNews that the brands awareness had quadruped between October last year to now.
“We've still got a lot of headroom to go in terms of awareness, but as our product range widens and as we get more foot traffic, more and more people are getting exciting about our brand and we're getting relevant.
“We just broke through our 10% market share goal. To hit 10% of share from launching 6 months ago in terms of sales that's huge for us and that's been a great result.”
The next 12 months are set to be busy for the technology brand and since Lenovo acquired Motorola last year Reynolds explained that the brand could be selling handsets in this market soon.
“Now we do everything from the cloud to the data centre, to mobile and everything in between,” he said. “Whether it's consumer or business, later this year you should be able to buy a handset, phone, tablet, PC for home or business from Lenovo. That’s quite exciting.”
Revisit the profile of Lenovo global CMO David Roman that appeared in the 28 November issue of AdNews, outlining the brand's strategy.
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